AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE ROOTS OF CODEPENDENCY Part 1

[Juan and Yenan]

By Apostle Yenan Y. Perez

Introduction
To be healthy people we need to liberate our inner child and stop the projection of trying to rescue others. We need to get in touch with our feelings and stop trying to control other people feelings and actions. We need to look inside and appreciate ourselves, and stop persecuting other people. We need to let go and surrender to God’s grace. Renounce and let others be, disengage, embrace ourselves and be ourselves. We need to love ourselves by loving God.
What is Codependency?
Co-dependency is a dysfunctional pattern of living which emerge from our family of origin as well as our culture, producing arrested identity development, and resulting in an over-reaction to things outside of us and an under-reaction to things inside of us. Left untreated, it can deteriorate into an addiction (Friel 157).
Co-dependency involves the unhealthy fusing of two lives to the detriment of both partners. The most important aspect of co-dependency involves confusion over boundaries, identity, and proper responsibilities. The co-dependent lacks a sense of where his/her being stops and other’s begins, and is unable to separate the individual selves (Mc Dill 107). A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior (Beattie 36). We can begin to define co-dependency as any suffering and/or dysfunction that is associated with or results from focusing on the needs and behavior of others (Whitfield 28).
We can resume it like this, a codependent person is one who had let another person take control of him or her life by focusing in the needs and behavior of others, and is over-reacting according to the feelings and behaviors of the other person.
“Overreacting may impair our mental functioning. Decisiveness is hindered by worrying about what other people think, telling ourselves we have to be perfect, and telling ourselves to hurry. We falsely believe we can’t make the wrong choice, we’ll never have another chance, and the whole world waits and rises on this particular decision” (Beattie164).
Codependency is a problem of enmeshment of boundaries, loss of inner control and a desperate need for love and acceptance. Is to be “stuck” in one or more stages of our identity development, and also a very big lack in our needs development. It is to have our inner child kidnapped.
Some therapist as the Friel’ believes that codependency is a behavior you learned from your family and the culture, and that people select partners that are codependents because they are codependents. They believe that addictions are symptoms of codependency, and that codependency is a symptom of a crisis in one or some of the first four stages of identity in Erikson’s eight stages of life. I also believe that a sense of deficiency in the stages of Maslow hierarchy of needs it is hand to hand with the identity crisis of Erickson for the person experiencing codependency. Codependency is a deficiency in our emotional needs and our social needs. “The first four levels of needs concern what Maslow (1955) referred to as d needs -“d” for deficiency. It is only after these deficiency needs are fulfilled that the higher-order need for self-actualization becomes important” (Hogan & Smither 299).